SAP And SAS Partner On Big Data Analytics

SAP and SAS announced yesterday they will be partnering to offer SAS analytics applications on SAP’s HANA platform.

SAP and SAS will collaborate to bring SAS’s analytics to capabilities to SAP’s HANA data platform for their joint customers, the two companies announced yesterday in a joint statement.

The new partnership will aim to solve big data problems that involve large amounts of data and high computing intensity, Russ Cobb, SAS’s VP of alliances and product marketing said yesterday.

“We’re looking into where we can apply this to big customer business problems. Some areas we think are right for this include customer intelligence, marketing effectiveness analysis and risk analysis,” Cobb noted.

Offering SAS analytics on HANA will allow companies to do analysis on their data without having to replicate or extricate the data somewhere else, said Ingo Brenckmann, SAP’s senior development manager. “A core issue for SAP is eliminating data movement. With very large data sets, companies don’t want to have to move those somewhere else,” Brenckmann explained.

Cutting out that data replication and movement will bring operational efficiencies and simplify data projects for customers, SAS’s Cobb remarked. And brining the analytics to the data will also help cut costs on those data projects and enable real-time analytics, he added.

Over the next 3-4 months the two companies are planning on talking together with their joint customers to see where they can benefit form the partnership, Cobb reported.

The two companies said that they had been receiving an increasing number of requests from their overlapping customer bases on how they could collaborate. “A lot of our joint customers want a single SAP-SAS environment together. So we’re responding to that customer demand,” Randy Guard, SAS’s VP of product management, explained.

Jonathan Camhi has been an associate editor with Bank Systems & Technology since 2012. He previously worked as a freelance journalist in New York City covering politics, health and immigration, and has a master's degree from the City University of New York's Graduate School ... View Full Bio

How does this relate to Hadoop? Is it potentially competitive/alternative to Hadoop, something completely different? Open source concept makes sense in the big data space in terms of collaboration opportunities, info sharing, etc. At the same time, this also is where companies are seeking competitive advantage and differentiation.

They are still very much in the exploratory phase of this, both companies admitted as much. But the reason they decided to announce the partnership so early was because they actually wanted dispel the notion that they're competitors. I think both companies think they have too much to gain by working together.

Yes, this definitely appears to be a case of "the customer wins" -- I don't quite understand how this partnership will work and it certain is unusual to see two competitors partnering on this kind of differentiating solution. But it sounds like it should benefit customers and that's what matters, not vendor turf battles.